Shipping: What You Might Not Know — Timeframes and Rules
The complicated road of shipping regs, and what it means for your order.
Shipping regs in the USA are a complex and often difficult road to navigate. I’ve been doing it for many years across the big 3 shippers (UPS, FedEx and USPS). We ship roughly 3,000 packages out monthly. Even when you ship that much that often, it seems there is still always something to learn.
California (I know, shocker) for example — we can’t ship worms there which have any soil on them. Something about an invasive beetle. Potassium nitrate, while very stable, is an oxidizer and can’t go USPS with the exception of small quantities. Things like our Outlaw X Exploding Targets and Tannerite® have to go UPS Ground only. This is why we can only ship to the lower 48. They are also required to be clearly marked with the little black and white diamond.
And THESE things are just a few! We sell a few plants as well — a whole new set of regs for those.
Believe it or not, you break them and you will get a call from the USPS inspector or USDA (eventually). And the fines are no joke. Fortunately, they are pretty understanding — if you look into USPS Publication 52, you’ll understand why. It looks like it was written by a team of attorneys. That being said, they are usually polite, send emails, and let you know before they levy fines that can run into the 10’s of thousands or more.
Back to the Tannerite® and Exploding Targets: those can’t fly, ever — meaning they can never legally be aboard an airplane. And since reaching Alaska or Hawaii means either flying or crossing Canada by ground (a different country), they can’t go either way. That’s why we don’t ship to Alaska or Hawaii.
That being said, if you’re here in the good ole lower 48, you can normally expect arrival of your package on average in 3 business days. We normally ship same or next day, depending on the time the order is placed.